20th CENTURY WOMEN. Perhaps my favorite score. Certainly one of my best known.

Writer and director Mike Mills and I have worked on many projects together over the long span of our friendship, including the earlier feature film BEGINNERS. He is one of my favorite collaborators. This film, 20th CENTURY WOMEN, is set in Southern California in 1979, with a protagonist who is a 15-years-old boy. Mike and I were both 15-year-old Southern California teens in 1979. It's partially an autobiographical story from Mike's perspective, but there is a lot of both our lived experiences in this movie.

For the film score, we endeavored to fashion a musical identity that could plausibly have been created in that era, given the equipment and sensibility of the time, while strenuously avoiding nostalgia or sentiment. We wanted to create the most modern electronic art-pop of 1979, limiting ourselves to the instruments and equipment that would have been available to artists in that era, notably the Sequential Circuits Prophet 5 synthesizer (borrowed from a childhood friend - his dad bought it in 1978 and I played on that very keyboard back then), a Solina String Machine, a Roland Space Echo, and my cherished Fender Stratocaster electric guitar from 1977, which I purchased new from paper route money when I was 13. It remains my favorite guitar.

Our primary artistic model was the David Bowie/Brian Eno Berlin music of the late 70s, and Eno's visionary ambient records, music that both Mike and I revere. 

I pride myself on being an eclectic and versatile composer, but if there is any music that I’ve composed that is truly “my sound,” it is this music. It was a turning point for me artistically. And for that I am grateful to Mike Mills, a terrific creative partner. He spent countless hours with me in the studio, siting next to me at the keyboard, telling me which notes he liked and which ones he didn’t (usually my favorite notes), and both of us delighting in the rich sound of just an echo machine and a synthesizer filter, and the magic that can happen when you blindly twiddle knobs on equipment that you don't fully understand, exploring the sonic landscape like precocious teenagers.

The soundtrack was released by Rhino Records. It includes songs from the movie and features five tracks of my score. However the complete 20th CENTURY WOMEN soundtrack with all the original score music can only be found here on this site.